Cassian's public execution was not carried out.
It was sold.
A bell rang once beneath the imperial judgment platform.
It did not announce the beginning of an execution.
It opened the trading of claims.
The plaza floor split apart.
Forty white wagons rose from below.
Each had a chapel's pointed roof. Human teeth filled the windows in place of glass.
The chain linking all forty whispered prayers whenever the wheels moved.
The Mobile Immaculate Prison.
It had no address in the capital.
No judicial jurisdiction.
It remained in no city longer than three days, so anyone who died inside could not be recorded as having died anywhere.
The door of the first wagon opened.
A man in white prison clothes stepped down.
Felix Dunn.
Forty-four.
Warden of the Immaculate Prison.
He wiped the blood from the judgment platform before approaching Cassian.
He scrubbed at the stain left by three thousand sins with a handkerchief.
Even when the cloth burned black, he did not replace it.
He used the same piece of fabric to the end.
"I have come for a member of my family," Felix said.
Seraphina folded the judgment.
"You call condemned prisoners family?"
"From the moment they enter."
"And when they leave?"
"My family does not leave."
Felix smiled.
He had a warm face.
When someone coughed inside a wagon, he turned immediately.
"Heat some water for compartment seventeen. Mira's cough has gone wet."
The guards moved.
He knew the prisoner's name and the sound of her cough.
Seraphina unfolded a new document.
`Amendment to the method of public execution.`
`The remaining lifespan, possessed sinmarks, and cathedral evidence of the accused, Cassian Crow, shall vest in the Immaculate Prison.`
`Completion of confinement shall constitute legal death.`
Cassian asked.
"You're selling my lifespan instead of my neck?"
"A neck can be sold only once. A lifespan can be divided," Seraphina said.
"Your remaining days will be issued as Imperial Innocence Bonds."
"Who buys them?"
"People waiting for you to die."
Merchants raised their hands at the edge of the plaza.
Families of the cathedral dead.
Agents of noble houses.
Believers concealing black feathers.
A bond that Cassian would live until tomorrow.
A bond that he would die within the month.
A bond that his neck would be cut again.
The price rose.
Still alive, Cassian listened to the bidding on his death.
"This is an execution?"
"You die today in the citizens' ledger," Seraphina answered.
"And the body?"
"It disappears with the evidence."
"Convenient for you."
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
"That is why I signed it."
She did not apologize.
Marchesa gripped her sword below the platform.
"Are you transferring the shared debt?"
"No."
Seraphina showed her a copy of the alliance document.
"Cassian's sins remain with Cassian. Only his lifespan and place of custody change."
Marchesa read the sentence.
It was exact.
She took her hand from her sword.
"The law is always precisely cowardly."
"Like the general's terms of surrender."
The two women disliked each other.
They respected each other's precision.
Felix knelt before Cassian.
He did not put him in shackles.
First he removed Cassian's shoes.
"Cleaning again?"
"New family members receive clean shoes."
Felix washed Cassian's feet in warm water.
He wiped away the blood and cathedral ash between his toes.
Then he put clean white socks on him.
"Better than Odric."
"The Grand Inquisitor remembers only shoes."
Felix held out a pair of white prison shoes.
"I remember feet as well."
Cassian's name was already written inside.
Below it was a small number.
`Collateral lifespan: immeasurable.`
"Couldn't count it?"
"Because your death did not end after one occurrence."
Felix looked delighted.
Like a man who had acquired a rare member of the family.
"We will be able to sell you for a long time."
Cassian looked at his throat.
There was a sinmark.
The trace of thousands of lifespans converted into food for his family.
Killing him would yield an ability.
Felix stayed close despite knowing that.
"Do not kill me yet," he said.
"The wagons need my heart to depart."
"And after we arrive?"
"Our home has no destination."
Ria climbed onto the judgment platform.
Her left arm was fixed in a new splint.
She carried two ledgers in her right hand.
The cathedral victims.
The forty-seven people who could have been saved.
"I'm coming too."
Seraphina asked.
"Why?"
"You need a witness to confirm whether the public execution was completed."
"You may not come back."
"That is why I'm going."
Ria looked at Cassian.
"I will not falsely record this man as dead."
"And if I return alive?"
"I will record the execution as unfulfilled."
"Vicious as ever."
"I learned from you."
Felix offered Ria white prison shoes as well.
She refused them.
"I am not a prisoner."
"Everyone who boards a wagon is family."
"I am a witness."
"An occupation that outlives family."
Felix withdrew the shoes.
Instead, he tied a white cord to Ria's ledger.
`Witness to confirmation of execution.`
The other end connected to Cassian's restraint.
If he fled, Ria would be dragged first.
Cassian looked at the cord.
"Want me to cut it?"
"It will make the direction of your escape easier to record."
Ria left it intact.
Felix led Cassian to the thirty-ninth wagon.
The fortieth stood empty.
A wagon with no door or windows, only white walls.
A heartbeat sounded inside.
At the same tempo as Cassian's.
"Whose room is that?"
"The room for your sins."
"I'm over here."
"Three thousand people's worth is heavy for one body."
Felix stroked the fortieth wagon.
"We will distribute it among the family."
Twenty-four prisoners sat inside the thirty-ninth wagon.
All in white.
All empty-handed.
Cassian could not see a sinmark among them.
It was the same blankness he had seen when he first met Elodie.
But the princess's blankness had been smooth as finished glass.
Theirs bore scrape marks.
They were not people who had never possessed sin.
They were people from whom sin had been removed.
Felix introduced them one by one.
"A shoemaker. He starts with the left shoe every morning."
"A former soldier. He sleeps under the table during thunderstorms."
"A midwife. She is allergic to milk."
He did not state their crimes.
They had no charges.
They had habits, illnesses, and nightmares instead.
"Empty people?" Cassian asked.
Felix's face hardened.
For the first time.
"My family is not empty."
"Only their sin is."
"That is a blessing."
"A blessing that's easy to sell."
Felix closed the wagon door.
"Soon you will be comfortable too."
The chain locked from outside.
Only after the door closed did the prisoners look Cassian straight in the eye.
The shoemaker measured the circumference of his left foot with a white cord.
"What are you doing?"
"Shoes remain after death."
The former soldier put two fingers on the alignment seam around Cassian's neck.
He counted the pulse.
The midwife smelled the opened wound.
"It will open again within an hour."
"Can you close it?"
"Two loaves of bread."
"I won't have a ration."
"That's why I collect in advance."
The midwife scratched a line into the wagon wall with her nail.
`Cassian Crow. Two loaves.`
"I never agreed."
"Debts that enter here don't ask permission."
The shoemaker added his foot measurement to the wall.
The former soldier recorded how many times Cassian breathed.
Outside, the imperial family and the nobles bought his lifespan.
Inside, the prisoners divided the price of his shoes, wound, and corpse in advance.
Cassian could kill them.
But he did not yet know what killing them would yield.
The midwife read his gaze.
"That's the face of a man choosing whom to kill first."
"Who's the most expensive?"
"You," she answered.
"The newest arrival owes the most in here."
Cassian did not smile.
More precise than the prison that called him family were the prisoners who began by pricing his corpse.
The wagon moved.
The prisoners did not look at Cassian.
They looked only at his empty right sleeve.
As if it were a convenient place to hide food.
When the wagon passed beyond the capital gate, bread was distributed.
Twelve loaves for twenty-four people.
Enough for half a loaf each.
There was none for Cassian.
One prisoner tucked two loaves into his clothes.
A man past forty.
He had taken his neighbor's ration as well.
When someone tried to stop him, he bit their finger.
He had no sinmark.
The behavior remained.
"Give them back," Cassian said.
The man hid the bread.
"New family starves."
"I'm not family."
"Then die."
The man pulled a sharpened splinter of bone from the bread.
He stabbed Cassian's neck.
The alignment seam opened again.
Cassian did not evade him.
He caught the man's wrist with his left hand.
Took the bone splinter.
And drove it beneath the man's jaw.
The point pierced the roof of his mouth.
The man collapsed.
The wagon fell silent.
Cassian waited for the final breath.
The scent of sin.
A memory.
An ability.
Nothing emerged.
The man's last breath was as empty as winter air.
Cassian reached in and searched for a sinmark.
There was none.
There was truly nothing to gain.
"That's a first."
He had killed many powerless people.
Innocent people too.
Even they had left behind memory or sensation.
From this man, only the fact that Cassian had killed him remained.
The wagon floor opened.
A black thread crawled over from the fortieth wagon.
It wrapped around the dead man's ankle.
Cassian's empty shoulder grew hot.
One of the three thousand sins he had received in the cathedral left his body.
It traveled along the black thread and entered the corpse.
The man's eyes opened again.
They were not the eyes that had stolen bread moments before.
They belonged to a cleric who had died in the cathedral.
His mouth began a confession.
"I pronounced an innocent defendant guilty."
Cassian seized the corpse's throat again.
A voice came from the corner of the wagon.
"Don't kill him."
A hand writing the same name in seven different scripts stopped.
Sixteen-year-old Nev Karel raised his head.
The boy Cassian had left behind in the burning orphanage.
He was alive.
"In here, when you kill someone."
Nev pointed to the reanimated prisoner.
"Your sins increase one by one."